Kyle Haefner Communications Programmer Telecommunications Colorado State University Open Source Telecommunications Applications to Education
The Ongoing Dilemma Current telephony equipment is becoming obsolete Expensive maintenance Forced upgrades Limited functionality Vendors ending support
Alternatives? Pay the price and upgrade Upgrading SL100 will cost $$$,$$$ Find other vendors Cisco Avaya etc. Explore open source solutions Asterisk SER (Sip Express Router)
CSU's Answer 1. Use Asterisk as a voice mail service Integrates with current SL100 telephone switch Provides features not found in Octel (Web) 2. Replace Cisco Call Manager with Asterisk + SER ~150 phones 3. Provide unified phone service to satellite campuses and cooperative extensions. Networked Asterisk servers running on inexpensive hardware linked to main campus 4. Transition campus to VoIP using Asterisk + SER We have about 5 years before expensive forced hardware upgrade.
The Asterisk Open Source PBX Asterisk is a complete software PBX (Private Branch Exchange) It runs on Linux, BSD, OSX, Windows* It runs on off-the-shelf hardware It will even run on an $60 wireless router! It can inter-operate with almost every standards-based telephony equipment It is highly scalable And it's open source!!!
Where Asterisk came from Created by Mark Spencer Supported by a company called Digium http://www.digium.com/ Sell PCI cards that work with Asterisk Contributions from over 300 volunteers
Asterisk PBX Features VoIP (Voice Over IP) All common protocols (SCCP,SIP,MGCP,H.323) Voice mail services with directory Voice mail integrates with email Stream through a browser Call conferencing Interactive voice response Call queuing Music on hold Text-to-Speech more, More and MORE!
Who's Using Asterisk? Vonage Voice mail Frys Electronics Large Analog Telephone Installation University of Pennsylvania University of Utah Colorado State University Many More
Comparison: Octel Aria and Asterisk Octel Asterisk Cost of Octel Aria 350 $251,040.00 Hard drive 842MB 72KB for a one minute message 195 hours of messages 11,700 messages Cost of Asterisk System and hardware $2,335.00 Hard drive 400GB 72KB for a one minute message. 10.6 YEARS of messages ~55 MILLION messages
Asterisk Voice Mail - Progress Wrote web interface in PHP Stream voicemail, reply, forward Phone menus Modified to mimic Octel menu structure Added Octel functionality not native to Asterisk SMDI (Simplified Message Desk Interface) Connects Asterisk to SL100 Message waiting indicator Integrated with both phone and web
Asterisk Voice Mail - Web-VMail
Asterisk Voice Mail -Features Stream messages through a browser Email alerts of new Voice Mail Voice mail attached to e-mail Reply directly through the web (Java applet) Coming soon! Simple Message System (SMS) support for mobile devices. Instant Messenger integration. Integration with campus calendaring Set/Remove of extended absence greeting Go straight to voice mail following schedule
Asterisk Voice Mail - Time line July 2005 Beta testing with members of faculty and staff January 2006 Students in the residence hall added to Asterisk August 2006 Campus using Asterisk
Future Projects Asterisk PBX Purchased three more servers 1 Will be a redundant voice mail server 2 Will run SER (Sip Express Router) SER (Sip Express Router) Open source sip proxy Very fast 10,000 sip connections Passes call to Asterisk for PSTN and voice mail Linux high availably load balancing UltraMonkey DRDB (distributed replicated block device) for database and voice mail.
Future Projects Customer Relationship Managers Integration with customer relationship managers SugarCRM CallerID based database look ups Departments can get real time student information on computer screen when student calls in.
Future Projects Text to Speech Uses the Festival Engine Possibility of different voices Ex: current weather in Fort Collins Possible applications at CSU Interactive voice response Email over the phone Dynamic information over the phone
Future Projects Voice Recognition Sphinx2 Open Source voice recognition software from Carnegie Melon University Speaker independent Uses finite dictionaries CSU -> (See a shoe) Live demonstration of this is at: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dbohus/roomline/
Future Projects Schedule Based Call Routing Integration with campus calendaring system FreeBusy - PHP application Queries an MS Exchange server Follow-me application rings phones based on schedule Greetings reflect schedule status
Future Projects Ring Tones Ring melodies set from a web interface Allows easy audible differentiation of calls based on calling number Ring by name SIP phones announce the caller in his/her own voice Uses user recorded greeting
Future Projects High Availability UltraMonkey Suite Fast load balancing using the Linux Virtual Server Flexible high availability provided by the Linux-HA framework Connection synchronization allows connections to continue even if the active Linux-director fails and the stand-by is brought on line All code is open source
Future Projects - Redundancy DRDB Disk Replicated Block Device Block device which is designed to build high availability clusters. You could see it as a network RAID-1. Will synchronize voice mail and MySQL database across multiple machines.
Future Projects - Asterisk on a Linksys Router Cooperative Extension - CSU Centralize phone service Provide long distance and localized campus service Uses cheap hardware
Pros and Cons of Open Source Telephony Pros: "Swiss Army Knife" of Telecommunications Cost Infinitely customizable Vendor independent Rapid development cycle Cons Requires in-house expertise Support Rapid development cycle
Pro and Cons of Proprietary PBXs Pros: Support Choice of many vendors Well-defined cost model Cons Can't change code Expensive Pay for every feature Pay for upgrades Vendor lock in! No choice in hardware
References Asterisk http://www.digium.com and http://www.asterisk.org SIP http://www.iptel.org/ser/ Voice Recognition http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/ CRM http://www.vtiger.com/ High Availability http://www.ultramonkey.org Redundancy http://www.drbd.org/
Questions and Comments Thank You!